A few days ago I made the comment that Senator Obama's view that people have a fundamental right to health care/insurance strikes me as ill-considered. A couple of readers thought this sounded a bit callous and uncompassionate, but I think it's Obama's view, though no doubt well intentioned, that is the less compassionate. Here are a few reasons why:
1) A right held by one person entails an obligation owed by another. By conferring a right to health care on one person we obligate everyone else, including others who may be struggling to make ends meet, to fork over even more of their income to the person with the right. In other words, we give people who may or may not be in genuine need a claim on your wallet. That may seem compassionate to the recipient, but it's decidedly uncompassionate to the person who must hand over his purse rather than be allowed to use his resources to help his own family.
2) When someone feels they have a right to receive a benefit from the state it stifles gratitude. They expect the taxpayer to pay up, indeed they come to believe they're owed the benefit and are aggrieved if the taxpayer resists. Rather than fostering gratitude for the sacrifice others make on their behalf the right cultivates instead a sense of entitlement in the recipient.
3) Since a right to health care puts the taxpayer in relation to the recipient like a debtor stands in relation to the person he owes, the taxpayer tends quite naturally to feel resentful at the transfer of his resources to people who demand that he do so. This not only serves to foster bitterness between classes but, to the extent that the classes break along racial lines, it nurtures a seething racial animosity.
4) When people feel the government owes them a benefit it stifles their initiative. People who know that others will provide for their needs are much less motivated to work to provide them for themselves. If we didn't learn anything else from Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs we should have at least learned that dependency destroys the work ethic.
5) When charity becomes a government function it harms the church. Churches which have robust charitable ministries are often strong and vibrant, but churches which have had their outreach to their communities co-opted by the state often grow flaccid, weak, and cold. Charity should be the role of the church and people should turn first to churches when they're in need of help. Churches are then in a position to help these people not only with financial assistance but also to teach them how to manage money, how to parent, and instruct them in many other of the virtues necessary to rise out of poverty. When the government takes over this role, however, recipients have no expectations placed upon them and thus often fail to rise above the station in life to which they were born.
Marvin Olasky's Tragedy of American Compassion should be required reading for anyone who thinks that government "compassion" is the only way, or even the best way, to help people.
RLC